What else happened at the Sebastopol City Council Meeting?
Recap of the Sebastopol City Council Meeting of Oct. 15
All council members were present for the Oct. 15 council meeting, including Mayor Diana Rich, Councilmember Neysa Hinton, and Councilmember Sandra Maurer. Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman and Councilmember Jill McLewis, who were attending the League of California Cities Conference in Long Beach, were present via Zoom.
Dante Del Prete’s presentation on the water system dominated the first part of the meeting, but the council still had time to contemplate a couple of other topics.
Consent Calendar
(The consent calendar consists of items that are routine in nature or don’t require additional discussion, often because they’ve been discussed extensively at a previous council meeting.)
In addition to approving the minutes of a previous city council meeting, the city council unanimously authorized the Solid Waste Ad Hoc Committee and evaluation panel to select a top-ranked proposer and authorized staff to proceed into negotiations.
There were five other consent calendar items, but they were removed from the consent calendar for further discussion by the council at the end of the meeting.
Presentations
Public Works Director Dante Del Prete gave a presentation on the city’s water system. You can read about his presentation in our recent article, “Come on in, the water's fine...for now.”
Regular Agenda
Council approves a $42,760 increase to the contract with 4 Leaf Planning Services. The council unanimously agreed to increase the contract with 4 Leaf Planning Services by $42,760 to fund the position currently filled by consultant Jane Reilly, through December. The City will remain within the budget appropriations limit for the Community Development Director (CDD) position even with the contract increase. The hiring process for the new CDD is underway, and the contract for this position is scheduled for approval at the Nov. 5 city council meeting.
Seeking direction on a League of California Cities Conference resolution. The conference was considering a resolution aimed at urging legislators to pass laws that treat lawmakers and city officials equally. According to the staff report, “Over the past several years, the California Legislature has passed and the Governor has signed many laws that apply to local governments and do not apply to the state or the state legislature. Examples of rules that apply to other agencies but not the California Legislature include minimum wage, whistleblower protections, public access, and more. Additionally, legislators in California are able to bypass open meeting laws via partisan caucuses that allow them to gather privately.” The council unanimously directed Vice Mayor Zollman to vote for this resolution. They gave him discretion to vote against it should he learn something that indicated it was a bad idea—though they wanted an explanation if he did.
Items moved from the consent calendar to the regular agenda
Choosing the Mayor and Vice Mayor redux. Council member Sandra Maurer and Mayor Rich wanted to reconsider the procedure for choosing the vice mayor decided on at the last council meeting. At that meeting, the council had decided to create a policy that the vice mayor would automatically become mayor the next year and that the selection of vice mayor would be determined by who got the highest number of votes in the previous election.
One of the problems with this approach is that, this time around, Maurer wouldn’t have a chance to be mayor since she was the third-highest vote getter and is half way through her current four-year term. Zollman would be mayor next year, McLewis the year after that, and by the time it was Maurer’s turn, her term would be over.
Maurer and Rich suggested using a random number generator to choose the vice mayor instead.
The stated goal of both these “objective” methods is to avoid the hurt feelings stemming from a vote of the council, which is the way the mayor and vice mayor have previously been chosen.
At McLewis’s request, discussion of this idea was postponed until the next council meeting.
Recruiting members for city committees and commissions. Since there might be changes coming to the structure of the Design Review Board and Planning Commission—the city is considering combining them—some council members wondered whether the city should hold off on recruiting, interviewing and appointing new members to those boards. In the end, at the suggestion of Assistant City Manager Mary Gourley, they decided to begin recruitment for open positions, since this can take several months, but not to interview and appoint anyone until a decision had been made about combining the two.
The council also unanimously voted to begin recruitment and appointment for the Public Arts Commission and to delay recruitment for the Climate Action Committee, until the committee has defined the open positions they are recruiting for.
Watch the full Oct. 15 city council meeting here. The next Sebastopol City Council meeting is on Nov. 5 at the Sebastopol Youth Annex, 425 Morris St., Sebastopol.